Cryptanalysis of HMAC/NMAC-Whirlpool

In this paper, we present universal forgery and key recovery attacks on the most popular hash-based MAC constructions, e.g., HMAC and NMAC, instantiated with an AES-like hash function Whirlpool. These attacks work with Whirlpool reduced to 6 out of 10 rounds in single-key setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result on “original” key recovery for HMAC (previous works only succeeded in recovering the equivalent keys). Interestingly, the number of attacked rounds is comparable with that for collision and preimage attacks on Whirlpool hash function itself. Lastly, we present a distinguishing-H attack against the full HMACand NMAC-Whirlpool.